Archive for January, 2012

Spring, and everything outside is growing,
even the tall cypress tree.
We must not leave this place.
Around the lip of the cup we share, these words,

My Life Is Not Mine

If someone were to play music, it would have to be very sweet.
We’re drinking wine, but not through lips.
We’re sleeping it off, but not in bed.
Rub the cup across your forehead.
This day is outside living and dying.

Give up wanting what other people have.
That way you’re safe.
“Where, where can I be safe?” you ask.

This is not a day for asking questions,
not a day on any calendar.
This day is conscious of itself.
This day is a lover, bread, and gentleness,
more manifest than saying can say.

Thoughts take form with words,
but this daylight is beyond and before
thinking and imagining. Those two,
they are so thirsty, but this gives smoothness
to water. Their mouths are dry, and they are tired.

Like this:

My world, my California, still needs to be made.
To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly.
To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one.
Maybe you have to be lost.
The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.

The Liebster Blog Award is an award given to bloggers by bloggers, and is reserved to ‘upstart’ blogs with less than 200 followers.
It originated in Germany and its meaning is ‘beloved’, or favorite.<3
It was bestowed to me by the Kuwaiti artist (und blogschwester!) Ghadah Alkandari at PrettyGreenBullet, whom I consider a role model as a 360 degree artist and blogger.
Needless to say it is a great honor to receive this, and more to receive it from Ghadah.

Check out her other awardees, it is blog goodness at its BESTE!

I in turn will have to bestow the award onto five upstart bloggers, so stay tuned, deliberations have just started.

In the winter, Venice is like an abandoned theatre. The play is finished, but the echoes remain.

Arbit Blatas

To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.

Alexander Herzen

There is something so different in Venice from any other place in the world, that you leave at once all accustomed habits and everyday sights to enter an enchanted garden.

Mary Shelley

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

Erica Jong

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand.

Lord Byron

…

A train-ride takes you from Milano to Venice..whose real name is Venezia, the Most Serene city and splendid, golden Republic. On the train you think about Byron, his letters written on trains, his Venetian Countess.

Through frozen fields and dormant earth, through fog and long-gone rice paddies , you deboard to the Sublime.

At dusk the lights from bars and cafes shimmer on the dark waters, and you start thinking in cliches, such as temporarily inhabiting an Impressionist painting.

Yet the feeling is fresh and true: each visit to this surrealists’ dream had its poignant moment of suspension of disbelief.

Each time the city grabs you and takes you away with her.
…
Here’s a taste of today’s acts of flanerie in La Serenissima.

The Sun, the Moon, and on there being no abstracts in life. Pencil, ink, watercolor on 4″X5″ canvas.2009

Ink on hand.book paper. Paris, 2011.

Persimmon- very quick pastel rendering. November 12, 2009.

Casa Del Fascio, contrast corrected thru Photoshop, Como, 2007

Pencil and Watercolor on canvas

Baggalini Red.

Platonic Solid Exercise. Graphite on Paper. 2007

Ink and watercolor on paper and tracing paper. A bit of digital manipulation. Feb. 09,2011.

Ink on tracing paper. Kuwait, January 2010. The scene at the bottom is what I saw-or decided to see- at The Avenues, the most popular malla in Kuwait City. There is nothing like seeing photography and drawings from a trip abroad to make you realize all reality is subjective, and we choose to see what we want to. We just don’t realize it in our own backyard.

July 27, San Diego Museum Of Art. The Age of Enlightenment – Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breuteuil, Marquise du Chatelet by Yinka Shonibare- Ink on hand.book paper

Ink on Paper. December 2010.

Graphite on paper and magazine cutouts. December 27, 2010. Miti and Gianni Aiello.